Tennessee Williams | About Tennessee Williams | American Masters | PBS About Tennessee Williams Tennessee Williams: Orpheus of The American Stage About Tennessee Williams Comments Tennessee Williams at age 54 in 1965. Photo by Orland Fernandez. He was brilliant and prolific, breathing life and passion into such memorable characters as Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski in his critically acclaimed A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE. And like them, he was troubled and self-destructive, an abuser of alcohol and drugs. He was awarded four Drama Critic Circle Awards, two Pulitzer Prizes and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was derided by critics and blacklisted by Roman Catholic Cardinal Spellman, who condemned one of his scripts as “revolting, deplorable, morally repellent, offensive to Christian standards of decency.” He was Tennessee Williams, one of the greatest playwrights in American history. Born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi in 1911, Tennessee was the son of a shoe company executive and a Southern belle. Williams described his childhood in Mississippi as happy and carefree. This sense of belonging and comfort were lost, however, when his family moved to the urban environment of St. Louis, Missouri.

It was there he began to look inward, and to write— “because I found life unsatisfactory.” Williams’ early adult years were occupied with attending college at three different universities, a brief stint working at his father’s shoe company, and a move to New Orleans, which began a lifelong love of the city and set the locale for A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE. Williams spent a number of years traveling throughout the country and trying to write. His first critical acclaim came in 1944 when THE GLASS MENAGERIE opened in Chicago and went to Broadway. It won a the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and, as a film, the New York Film Critics’ Circle Award. At the height of his career in the late 1940s and 1950s, Williams worked with the premier artists of the time, most notably Elia Kazan, the director for stage and screen productions of A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, and the stage productions of CAMINO REAL, CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, and SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH. Kazan also directed Williams’ film BABY DOLL.

Like many of his works, BABY DOLL was simultaneously praised and denounced for addressing raw subject matter in a straightforward realistic way. The 1960s were perhaps the most difficult years for Williams, as he experienced some of his harshest treatment from the press. In 1961 he wrote THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, and in 1963, THE MILK TRAIN DOESN’T STOP HERE ANY MORE. His plays, which had long received criticism for openly addressing taboo topics, were finding more and more detractors. Around this time, Williams’ longtime companion, Frank Merlo, died of cancer. Williams began to depend more and more on alcohol and drugs and though he continued to write, completing a book of short stories and another play, he was in a downward spiral. In 1969 he was hospitalized by his brother. After his release from the hospital in the 1970s, Williams wrote plays, a memoir, poems, short stories and a novel. In 1975 he published MEMOIRS, which detailed his life and discussed his addiction to drugs and alcohol, as well as his homosexuality.

In 1980 Williams wrote CLOTHES FOR A SUMMER HOTEL, based on the lives of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Only three years later, Tennessee Williams died in a New York City hotel filled with half-finished bottles of wine and pills. It was in this desperation, which Williams had so closely known and so honestly written about, that we can find a great man and an important body of work. His genius was in his honesty and in the perseverance to tell his stories. What did you think? About the Playwright: A Streetcar Named Desire — Utah Shakespeare Festival “If I did not write, I’d go mad.” —Tennessee Williams Born on March 26, 1911 in Columbus, Missouri, Thomas Lanier “Tennessee” Williams is considered one of the foremost American playwrights of the twentieth century. He is best known for The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He was the son of pioneer Tennesseeans, mostly military men and politicians. Most of the biographical information available on Tennessee Williams came from Williams himself.

He wrote his own history in the form of essays and introductions to his plays, and helped others write it through numerous interviews which he gave. Some sources list Williams’s birth date as 1914, but Williams purposely confused the year--not out of vanity, but out of necessity: early in his life he entered a play-writing contest in which he had to knock three years off his age to qualify. He won the contest, but never corrected the erroneous date of birth. Williams wrote about loneliness, frustration, and the desperate need for communication by people who are society’s misfits. At least parts of this had to reflect his own life. Sometimes a misfit himself, Williams left home for good at an early age. His mother was overprotective, and he did not like his father. During his childhood, his sister, Rose, was his only friend. Later she was confined to an institution after an emotional breakdown from which she never recovered. His father was a traveling salesman who spent very little time with his family and made no permanent home for them as they moved among various Mississippi towns. When his father took a job managing sales for a shoe company, the family moved to St. Louis in 1918.

A year later a younger brother, Dakin, was born. The family struggled to survive life with a father who was stingy, crude, and often drunk. The family was marked with anger, tensions, and separateness. Williams recalled being teased by gangs of boys when he began to go to school. Nevertheless, he graduated from high school in January 1929, and went on to the University of Missouri that fall. In 1932, during the Great Depression, he dropped out of college in order to take a full-time job in a shoe company. His three years there were, he said, “a living death.” After suffering a physical breakdown, Williams went to live with grandparents in Memphis, where he enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis. There his interest in writers such as D. H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, and Herman Melville intensified. In 1938, he graduated from the University of Iowa and began writing and wandering, both of which continued throughout his life, in spite of his later affluence. Williams’s career as a playwright began in earnest in 1935, when his first play was produced.

(This play has never been printed.) The next year, he became associated with the Mummers, a lively St. Louis theatre group. By 1939, he had dropped the Thomas Lanier and ceased to be simply a local playwright. This was the year he lied about his age and submitted a series of plays to the Group Theater. The most important result of the Group Theatre prize was that Williams got himself an agent, Audrey Wood, who had faith in him and worked hard for him. She immediately procured Williams a Rockefeller Fellowship, which gave him money enough to work comfortably. His first published plays appeared in The Best Plays in 1940, 1941, 1942, 1944, and 1945. He achieved his greatest acclaim as a playwright during the 1940s and ‘50s. Though he spent six months writing screenplays in Hollywood, The Glass Menagerie opened in Chicago on December 26, 1944, and in New York on March 31, 1945. The play ran for more than a year, and Williams had arrived.

From that time on, his career is a matter of public record. For the rest of his life, he averaged more than a play every two years. If we take 100 performances as a respectable run for a play in New York, Williams had only two failures before 1963. His greatest commercial and critical successes were The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A Streetcar Named Desire, and The Night of the Iguana. These plays not only had the longest runs, but all received the Drama Critics Circle Award, and both A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof were given the Pulitzer Prize. Williams took comfort in the knowledge that he had gained a reputation as one of the handful of American playwrights who could be considered serious dramatists. During the 1970s, Williams became depressed and went into a decline. He spent two months in a psychiatric hospital in St. Louis, dealing with personal and professional pressures. He later told interviewers that he would stick with off-Broadway, where tensions were less stressful for him. He published three collections of short plays, and Hollywood has made over fourteen films from his plays and short stories.

Williams’s plays contain themes aplenty, though he said of them: “I have never been able to say what was the theme of my play, and I don’t think I have ever been conscious of writing with a theme in mind. . . . Usually when asked about a theme, I look vague and say, ‘It’s a play about life’” (American Writers [St. Paul: University of Minnesota, 1974], 384). Williams wrote about both victims and victimizers, such as Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski, but some of his best-written characters are his versions of society’s misfits: artists, madmen, cripples, foreigners, and perverts. Williams invariably explores the relationships his characters have with God and the universe, yet his themes imply that there is no God and that most of society fits into one or more of the above categories of misfits. His characters try to escape this godless universe by running away from it (like Tom in The Glass Menagerie) or by retreating into themselves (like Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire).

From the beginning of his career, Williams tried to tell the real truth about human beings, but he never wanted to do that as a realist. He made constant use of both literary and theatrical devices of nonrealistic sort, ranging from the subtle to the shockingly obvious, from organic machine to pure gimmick, from the mythic to the popular. Mythic and significant names were Williams’s way of stressing the nonrealistic elements in characters. As though pushing his characters toward caricature and his plots toward myth and decorating both with symbols were not enough, Williams made use of every possible tool of the theatre—sets, props, lights, sound—to emphasize that his plays were not realistic. Clearly Williams was a playwright with a sharp eye for nuances of speech and gesture which have always been of great importance to the realistic dramatist; yet, he consistently chose to work in the nonrealistic tradition. Williams died in 1983, at the age of 72. He will always be revered as a troubled soul who was able to describe that torment better than any American dramatist before or since.

(The introductory quotation is from Harold Clurman, Tennessee Williams: Eight Plays [New York: Doubleday, 1979], ix.) × Tennessee Williams (Author of A Streetcar Named Desire) edit data Thomas Lanier Williams III, better known by the nickname Tennessee Williams, was a major American playwright of the twentieth century who received many of the top theatrical awards for his work. He moved to New Orleans in 1939 and changed his name to "Tennessee," the state of his father's birth. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948 and for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955. In addition, The Glass Menagerie (1945) and The Night of the Iguana (1961) received New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards. His 1952 play The Rose Tattoo (dedicated to his lover, Frank Merlo), received the Tony Award for best play. Characters in his plays are often seen as representations of his family members.

Laura Wingfield in The Glass M Thomas Lanier Williams III, better known by the nickname Tennessee Williams, was a major American playwright of the twentieth century who received many of the top theatrical awards for his work. He moved to New Orleans in 1939 and changed his name to "Tennessee," the state of his father's birth. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948 and for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955. In addition, The Glass Menagerie (1945) and The Night of the Iguana (1961) received New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards. His 1952 play The Rose Tattoo (dedicated to his lover, Frank Merlo), received the Tony Award for best play. Characters in his plays are often seen as representations of his family members. Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie was understood to be modeled on Rose. Some biographers believed that the character of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire is also based on her. Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie was generally seen to represent Williams' mother, Edwina.

Characters such as Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie and Sebastian in Suddenly, Last Summer were understood to represent Williams himself. In addition, he used a lobotomy operation as a motif in Suddenly, Last Summer. The Pulitzer Prize for Drama was awarded to A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948 and to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955. These two plays were later filmed, with great success, by noted directors Elia Kazan (Streetcar) with whom Williams developed a very close artistic relationship, and Richard Brooks (Cat). Both plays included references to elements of Williams' life such as homosexuality, mental instability, and alcoholism. Although The Flowering Peach by Clifford Odets was the preferred choice of the Pulitzer Prize jury in 1955 and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was at first considered the weakest of the five shortlisted nominees, Joseph Pulitzer Jr., chairman of the Board, had seen Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and thought it worthy of the drama prize. The Board went along with him after considerable discussion.[18] Williams wrote The Parade, or Approaching the End of a Summer when he was 29 and worked on it sporadically throughout his life.

A semi-autobiographical depiction of his 1940 romance with Kip Kiernan in Provincetown, Massachusetts, it was produced for the first time on October 1, 2006 in Provincetown by the Shakespeare on the Cape production company, as part of the First Annual Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival. Other works by Williams include Camino Real and Sweet Bird of Youth. His last play went through many drafts as he was trying to reconcile what would be the end of his life.[14] There are many versions of it, but it is referred to as In Masks Outrageous and Austere. ...more Tennessee Williams Biography (Playwright) Died: 25 February 1983 (choking) Birthplace: Columbus, Mississippi Best known as: Pulitzer-winning author of A Streetcar Named Desire Name at birth: Thomas Lanier Williams Tennessee Williams wrote smoldering, passionate, conflicted dramas that attracted top actors and gave 20th-century American theater and film some of its most complex and enduring material.

Reared in Mississippi and Missouri, Williams experienced the beauty of the South and the warmth of family as well as turmoil--including his father's emotional volatility and his own and his sister's depression--that later showed up in his plays. His greatest hit, the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), featured Marlon Brando's Stanley Kowalski bellowing for his wife, "Stellaaaaah," and Jessica Tandy's Blanche DuBois declaring, "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers." Original productions and revivals of Williams' work on stage, screen and TV drew the likes of Karl Malden and Anthony Quinn (Streetcar), Christopher Walken (Sweet Bird of Youth), Katharine Hepburn (The Glass Menagerie), Burl Ives and Ben Gazzara (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), and Bette Davis (Night of the Iguana). Troubled by anxiety, alcohol and drugs throughout his adult life, Williams choked to death in his New York City apartment when the cap of a medicine bottle, which he apparently used as a spoon for pills, got caught in his throat.

Extra credit: Among Williams’ numerous honors were another Pulitzer (Cat, 1955) and a Tony Award for best play (The Rose Tattoo, 1950)… He first used the pen name “Tennessee” in 1939. According to his Memoirs (Doubleday, 1972), he chose it because his ancestors had lived there. Reportedly, he also sometimes claimed to have gotten it from college classmates who couldn’t remember which Southern state he was from… He began writing poems, stories and plays as a student at the University of Missouri, Washington University in St. Louis, and the State University of Iowa, where he finally graduated in 1938 at age 27… Never married, he had long-term companionships with two men: Pancho Rodriguez y Gonzalez and Frank Merlo. Copyright © 1998-2017 by Who2?, LLC. All rights reserved. Tennessee Williams Analysis - eNotes.com Tennessee Williams Analysis Tennessee Williams is often called a poetical playwright. What is poetical about his plays? What techniques does Williams use to blend illusion and reality in The Glass Menagerie?

What is the relevance of the symbolic names in A Streetcar Named Desire? Is Blanche DuBois of A Streetcar Named Desire Williams’s most fully realized character? Compare the father-son confrontation in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with that in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949). Consider The Night of the Iguana as a play about survival. More Content: Analysis (hide) link Link In addition to his three dozen collected and uncollected stories, Tennessee Williams wrote two novels, a book of memoirs, a collection of essays, two volumes of poetry, numerous short plays, a screenplay, and more than twenty full-length dramas. Among the most important of his plays are The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and The Night of the Iguana (1961).

link Link Tennessee Williams’s most obvious achievements in literature lie in the field of drama, where he is considered by many to be America’s greatest playwright, a standing supported by two Pulitzer Prizes, a Commonwealth Award, a Medal of Freedom (presented by President Jimmy Carter), and an election in 1952 to a lifetime membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Williams himself, however, felt that his short fiction contained some of his best writing. Indeed, besides stories appearing in his own collections, Williams published stories in many of America’s most prestigious magazines, including The New Yorker and Esquire, and many have been selected for various anthologies, including three in Martha Foley’s Best American Short Stories annual anthologies. Williams’s short stories and plays alike dramatize the plight of the “fugitive,” the sensitive soul punished by a harsh, uncaring world; in the stories, however, readers find specific and frequent voice given to a theme and subject only hinted at in Williams’s drama, at least until his later, less memorable, plays: the plight of the homosexual in a bigoted society. link Link By critical consensus, Tennessee Williams ranks second after Eugene O’Neill among American dramatists.

He was greatly influenced by Anton Chekhov in his ability to universalize strongly realized local settings, in his portrayal of frail characters in a cold and alien world, in his frequently superb use of symbol and in his development of a natural structure that does not call attention to itself. Like Chekhov’s best works, Williams’s best plays appear to unfold as naturally as life itself. Williams has been accused at times of “purple” writing, sentimentality, and an overemphasis on violence and depravity. Although such criticism may occasionally be justified, Williams remains one of the most dramatically effective and profoundly perceptive playwrights of the modern theater. link Link Bloom, Harold, ed. Tennessee Williams. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. This collection of critical essays carries an introduction by Bloom that places Williams in the dramatic canon of American drama and within the psychological company of Hart Crane and Arthur Rimbaud. Authors in this collection take traditional thematic and historical approaches, noting Williams’s “grotesques,” his morality, his irony, his work in the “middle years,” and the mythical qualities in his situations and characters. Crandall, George W. Tennessee Williams: A Descriptive Bibliography.

Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995. An important bibliographical source. Falk, Signi Lenea. Tennessee Williams. 2d ed. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Though devoting most of her attention to Williams’s plays, Falk addresses many of the short stories. Falk’s discussions of “One Arm,” “Desire and the Black Masseur,” and “Portrait of a Girl in Glass” are especially interesting. Contains a useful, though dated, bibliography. Hayman, Ronald. Tennessee Williams: Everyone Else Is an Audience. New Haven: Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993. Kolin, Philip C. The Tennesse Williams Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004. A useful guide to Williams and his work. In 160 informative entries, Williams scholars offer the reader a wealth of information. Leverich, Lyle. Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. New York: Crown Publishers, 1995. This first volume of a two-volume biography traces Williams’s life for the first thirty-three years. Draws on previously unpublished letters, journals, and notebooks.

Discusses Williams’s focus on how society has a destructive influence on sensitive people and his efforts to... (The entire section is 787 words.) Get Free Access Start your free trial with eNotes for complete access to this resource and thousands more. 30,000+ Study Guides Save time with thousands of teacher-approved book and topic summaries. Get Homework Help Ask real teachers questions on any subject or search 300,000+ answers. On the Go Access Tennessee Williams - Biography - IMDb Tennessee Williams Jump to: Overview (3) | Mini Bio (3) | Trivia (25) | Personal Quotes (12) | Salary (1) Overview (3) Thomas Lanier Williams Mini Bio (3) Tennessee Williams met long-term partner Frank Merlo in the summer of 1948 (Merlo died of lung cancer in the fall of 1963). Though separated briefly in 1961 and again in 1962, the two were partners for 15 years. Merlo acted as his personal manager/secretary.

Williams spent much of his most prolific years in Rome, Italy, and his enduring friendship with Italian stage and screen legend Anna Magnani lasted 24 years and inspired both "The Rose Tattoo" and "Orpheus Descending". Magnani realized the lead parts of these two plays, which were written for her, in their film versions. The turbulent and inspirational friendship shared between Williams and Magnani is the subject of the internationally acclaimed play "Roman Nights" by Franco D'Alessandro. Aside from his published "Memoirs", the only authorized biographical book on Williams is by Bruce Smith, entitled "Costly Performances - Tennessee Williams; The Last Stage." This book deals with the last four years of Williams' life (1979-1983). - IMDb Mini Biography By: Franco D'Alessandro Tennesse Williams won two Pulitzer Prizes, for "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1947) and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1955).

His other major plays include "Summer and Smoke" (1948), "The Rose Tattoo" (1951), "Camino Real" (1953), "Sweet Bird of Youth" (1959), and "The Night of the Iguana" (1961). In addition to his two Pulitzers, Williams was nominated four times for the Tony Award for Best Play, wining once, for "The Rose Tattoo." (His last Best Play Tony Award nomination came 16 years after his death, for "Not About Nightingales.") He was born Thomas Lanier Williams, III in Columbus, Mississippi on March 26, 1911, to Cornelius Williams, a traveling salesman who denigrated his sensitive son, who was homosexual, as "Miss Nancy," and the former Edwina Dakin, who like many of her son's heroines thought of herself as a Southern belle. He first began to write while afflicted with paralysis as a child, which affected him between the ages of five and seven, turning him into an invalid for two years. At the age of 13, his mother -- who encouraged his writing -- gave him a typewriter.

The young Tom Williams wrote his first play "Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay! When he was a teenager, in 1935. He became a published writer at the age of 16, winning third prize (and $5) for his essay "Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport?" in a contest run by the magazine "Smart Set." The magazine "Weird Tales" published his short story "The Vengeance of Nitocris" in 1928. When young Tom Williams was 17, the family moved to St. Louis, where it existed in reduced circumstances during the Great Depression. It was a "setting" that would influence his first masterpiece, "The Glass Menagerie." He went to the University of Missouri-Columbia for his higher education, where his fraternity brothers gave Ham the nickname "Tennessee" due to his deep southern accent. Later, he transferred to Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri but did not take his degree until he was 28 years old, from the University of Iowa, where he matriculated in the school's writing program. Before attending Iowa, Williams led an itinerant life, including some time as a hobo wandering California and Mexico.

He moved to New Orleans in 1939, he renamed himself "Tennessee," ostensibly in homage to the state of his father's birth. In New Orleans, Williams lived in the French Quarter, where he labored for the Works Progress Administration's writers program. His first play, "A Battle of Angels," failed in Boston during tryouts in 1940. (He later reworked it as "Orpheus Descending" which debuted on Broadway in 1957.) Though the play failed, it made Williams known, and he worked as a contract writer, briefly, for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he sketched out the play that would become "Menagerie," his first great success. The tragic poet Hart Crane was one of his early influences, but as a playwright, it was Henrik Ibsen who had the greatest impact on him. Williams learned the Scandinavian literary dialect used by Ibsen to better understand his plays. Tennessee was close to his sister Rose, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia after accusing her father of making sexual advances towards her. Rose was institutionalized, eventually spending most of her life in mental institutions.

Cornelius and Edwina Williams permitted Rose to received a prefrontal lobotomy, which was performed in 1937 and which incapacitated her. Tennessee Williams was haunted by his sister's tragedy for the rest of his life, and never forgave his parents for authorizing the operation. Tennessee Williams suffered from depression, and feared going mad. He was briefly institutionalized in 1969 after a severe nervous breakdown, and never forgave his younger brother Dakin for allowing him to be put into a madhouse, which was a nightmare, according to his 1975 memoir. Part of Williams' problem, aside from his alcoholism, was that in the 1960s, he had become addicted to prescription drugs. The failure of "The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Any More" signaled the end of Williams greatness as a dramatist and his dominance of Broadway theater. The original January 1963 Broadway production of "Milk Train," starring Hermione Baddeley, closed after 16 performances.

Almost exactly a year later, a production directed by Tony Richardson , red hot after directing the movie Tom Jones (1963), and featuring Tallulah Bankhead and Tab Hunter , closed after five performances. Williams never recovered. His next original Broadway production, "Slapstick Tragedy" (an omnibus of two short plays) closed after seven performances in 1966. "The Seven Descents of Myrtle," another original, lasted but 29 performances in 1968. "Outcry" lasted but 12 performances in 1973, while the dual bill of "A Memory of Two Mondays" and "27 Wagons Full of Cotton" (the movie Baby Doll (1956) is based on the latter play) lasted 63 performances in 1976, but "The Eccentricities of a Nightingale" closed after 24 performances, and "Vieux Carré" didn't last a week, closing after six performances in 1977. The last Broadway original produced during Williams' lifetime, "Clothes for a Summer Hotel," lasted just 14 performances in 1980.

Two Broadway originals have been produced posthumously, "Garden District" that consisted of "Something Unspoken" and "Suddenly, Last Summer" which ran for 31 performances in 1995, and the early play "Not About Nightingales," which ran for 125 performances in 1999 and was nominated for a Best Play Tony. Tennessee Williams died on February 25, 1983, after choking on the cap of a bottle of eye drops that became lodged in his throat. (Williams was plagued by eye problems much of his adult life.) He was 71 years old. That his plays continue to be revived successfully on Broadway and on stages all over the world more than a half-century after their debuts is testament to his greatness as a dramatist. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Jon C. Hopwood Tom L. Williams, also known as Tennessee Williams, moved to St. Louis, MO at the age of 7, with his family, including his mother and sister, Rose. He lived there for the next 20 years in a number of middle-class and upper middle class apartment complexes and one rented home.

He went to the Field School as a child, and attended Soldan and University City High Schools. He attended Washington University, and his first professional play was produced while he was a student there. He failed Greek his senior year and did not graduate. As a young man, after attended the University of Missouri for 3 years, he worked at the International Shoe Company in Downtown St. Louis with his father. Tom, the character in Street Car Named Desired, also worked at a shoe factory in St. Louis. Indeed, all of Tennessee's most noted works were formed, shaped and sometimes written, during his life as a child, teenager and young man in St. Louis, MO from 1918 - 1940 or so... Tennessee Williams is a native of St. Louis, MO who owes his life's work to his life there. New Directions Publishing Company - Tennessee Williams Tennessee Williams America’s playwright Arguably America’s greatest playwright, Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Mississippi on March 26, 1911. The son of a salesman and a Southern belle, Williams spent his much of his early childhood in the parsonage of his beloved grandfather, an Episcopal priest, but moved with his family to St.

Louis, where he attended high school and began to write. Forced by his father to leave the University of Missouri and take a 9-to-5 job in a shoe factory, Williams became more and more determined to be a successful writer. He took classes at Washington University in St. Louis, and wrote his first plays. In 1938 he earned a degree fro the Univeristy of Iowa, where he wrote Spring Storm. Of the theater he remarked: “know it’s the only thing that saved my life.” By 1939, he had adopted the name of Tennessee Williams, written Battle of Angels (for which he received a Rockefeller Foundation grant) and found his loyal and intrepid agent Audrey Wood. His first great success came in 1944 with his “memory play,” The Glass Menagerie, which opened in Chicago to rave reviews and moved to Broadway, where it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play of the year. A Streetcar Named Desire, his next play, was a huge success in 1947 and established Williams as the premiere American playwright of his generation.

Between 1948 and 1959, he enjoyed a string of Broadway successes, including Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957) and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959). By 1959 he had won two Pulitzer Prizes, three New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, and a Tony Award. Movies were made of many of his plays and brought him huge success, renown and wealth. He continued to write voraciously, every day, producing novels, stories, and many new, radical and inventive plays, which did not always meet with the public’s approval, but which are now being revived and re-staged to great acclaim. As well as being astonishingly talented and prolific, Tennessee Williams was a man of considerable personal courage, willing to be open about being a gay man at a time when few were. Tennessee Williams is a cornerstone of New Directions, as we publish everything he wrote in his storied career. He is also our single bestselling author.

by 1000+ images about Tennessee Williams on Pinterest | Playwright, Mars and Armchairs Forward “There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.” ― Tennessee Williams. Portrait by Gisèle Freund See More Tennessee Williams Biography | List of Works, Study Guides & Essays | GradeSaver Williams, Tennessee Biography of Tennessee Williams Tennessee Williams was a master playwright of the twentieth century, and his plays A Streetcar Named Desire , The Glass Menagerie , and Cat On A Hot Tin Roof are considered among the finest of the American stage. At their best, his twenty-five full-length plays combined lyrical intensity, haunting loneliness, and hypnotic violence. He is widely considered the greatest Southern playwright and one of the greatest playwrights in the history of American drama. Born Thomas Lanier Williams on March 26, 1911, he suffered through a difficult and troubling childhood. His father, Cornelius Williams, was a shoe salesman and an emotionally absent parent. He became increasingly abusive as the Williams children grew older.

His mother, Edwina, was the daughter of a Southern Episcopal minister and had lived the adolescence and young womanhood of a spoiled Southern belle. Williams was sickly as a child, and his mother was a loving but smothering woman. In 1918 the family moved from Mississippi to St. Louis, and the change from a small provincial town to a big city was very difficult for Williams' mother. The young Williams was also influenced by his older sister Rose's emotional and mental imbalance during their childhood. In 1929, Williams enrolled in the University of Missouri. After two years his father withdrew him for flunking ROTC, and he took a job at his father's shoe company. He despised the job but worked at the warehouse by day and wrote late into the night. The strain was too much, and in 1935 Williams had a nervous breakdown. He recovered at his grandparents' home in Memphis, and during these years he continued to write. Amateur productions of his early plays were produced in Memphis and St. Louis. Rose's mental health continued to deteriorate as well.

During a fight between Cornelius and Edwina in 1936, Cornelius made a move towards Rose that he claimed was meant to calm her. Rose thought his overtures were sexual and suffered a terrible breakdown. Her parents had her lobotomized shortly afterward. Williams went back to school and graduated from the University of Iowa in 1938. He then moved to New Orleans, where he began going by the name Tennessee, a nickname he'd been given in college thanks to his southern drawl. After struggling with his sexuality through his youth, he finally entered a new life as a gay man, with a new name, a new home, and a promising new career. In the early 40s, Williams moved between several cities for different jobs and playwriting classes, also working at MGM as a scriptwriter. In 1944 came the great turning point in his career: The Glass Menagerie. First produced in Chicago to great success, the play transferred to Broadway in 1945 and won the NY Critics Circle Award. While success freed Williams financially, it also made it difficult for him to write. He went to Mexico to work on a play originally titled The Poker Night.

This play eventually became one of his masterpieces, A Streetcar Named Desire. It won Williams a second NY Critics' Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, enabling him to travel and buy a home in Key West as an escape for both relaxation and writing. The year 1951 brought The Rose Tattoo and Williams' first Tony award, as well as the successful film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Vivian Leigh. Around this time, Williams met Frank Merlo. The two fell in love, and the young man became Williams' romantic partner until Merlo's untimely death in 1961. He was a steadying influence on Williams, who suffered from depression and lived in fear that he, like his sister Rose, would go insane. The following years were some of Williams' most productive. His plays were a great success in the United States and abroad, and he was able to write works that were well-received by critics and popular with audiences, including The Rose Tattoo (1950), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Night of the Iguana (1961), and many others.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof won Williams his second Pulitzer Prize, and was his last truly great artistic and commercial success. He gave American theatergoers unforgettable characters, an incredible vision of life in the South, and a series of powerful portraits of the human condition. He was deeply interested in something he called "poetic realism," namely the use of everyday objects which, seen repeatedly and in the right contexts, become imbued with symbolic meaning. His plays also seemed preoccupied with the extremes of human brutality and sexual behavior: madness, rape, incest, nymphomania, as well as violent and fantastic deaths. Williams himself often commented on the violence in his own work, which to him seemed part of the human condition; he was conscious, also, of the violence in his plays being expressed in a particularly American setting. As with the work of Edward Albee, critics who attacked the "excesses" of Williams' work often were making thinly veiled attacked on his sexuality. Homosexuality was not discussed openly at that time, but in Williams' plays the themes of desire and isolation reveal, among other things, the influence of having grown up gay in a homophobic world. The sixties brought hard times for Tennessee Williams.

He had become dependent on drugs, and the problem only grew worse after the death of Frank Merlo in 1961. Merlo's death from lung cancer sent Williams into a deep depression that lasted ten years. Williams was also insecure about his work, which was sometimes of inconsistent quality, and he was violently jealous of younger playwrights. His sister Rose was in his thoughts during his later work. The later plays are not considered Williams' best, including the failed Clothes for a Summer Hotel. Overwork and drug use continued to take their toll on him, and on February 23, 1983, Williams choked to death on the lid of one of his pill bottles. He left behind an impressive body of work, including plays that continue to be performed the world over. In his worst work, his writing is melodramatic and overwrought, but at his best Tennessee Williams is a haunting, lyrical, and powerful voice, and one of the most important forces in twentieth-century American drama.

Study Guides on Works by Tennessee Williams Tennessee Williams Is Dead at 71 Tennessee Williams Is Dead at 71 By MEL GUSSOW ennessee Williams, whose innovative drama and sense of lyricism were a major force in the postwar American theater, died yesterday at the age of 71. He was found dead about 10:45 A.M. in his suite in the Hotel Elysee on East 54th Street. Officials said that death was due to natural causes, and that he had been under treatment for heart disease. An autopsy is scheduled for today. Author of more than 24 full-length plays, including ''The Glass Menagerie,'' ''A Streetcar Named Desire,'' ''Cat on a Hot Tin Roof'' - Tennessee Williams was the most important American playwright after Eugene O'Neill. The latter two won Pulitzer Prizes - and ''The Night of the Iguana,'' he had a profound effect on the American theater and on American playwrights and actors. He wrote with deep sympathy and expansive humor about outcasts in our society. Though his images were often violent, he was a poet of the human heart.

Plays Intensely Personal His works, which are among the most popular plays of our time, continue to provide a rich reservoir of acting challenges. Among the actors celebrated in Williams roles were Laurette Taylor in ''The Glass Menagerie''; Marlon Brando and Jessica Tandy in ''A Streetcar Named Desire'' (and Vivien Leigh in the movie version), and Burl Ives in ''Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.'' ''The Glass Menagerie,'' his first success, was his ''memory play.'' Many of his other plays were his nightmares. Although seldom intentionally autobiographical, the plays were almost all intensely personal -torn from his own private anguishes and anxieties. He once described his sister's room in the family home in St. Louis, with her collection of glass figures, as representing ''all the softest emotions that belong to recollection of things past.'' But, he remembered, outside the room was an alley in which, nightly, dogs destroyed cats. Mr. Williams's work, which was unequaled in passion and imagination by any of his contemporaries' works, was a barrage of conflicts, of the blackest horrors offset by purity.

Perhaps his greatest character, Blanche Du Bois, the heroine of ''Streetcar,'' has been described as a tigress and a moth, and, as Mr. Williams created her, there was no contradiction. His basic premise, he said, was ''the need for understanding and tenderness and fortitude among individuals trapped by circumstance.'' Just as his work reflected his life, his life reflected his work. A monumental hypochondriac, he became obsessed with sickness, failure and death. Several times he thought he was losing his sight, and he had four eye operations for cataracts. Constantly he thought his heart would stop beating. In desperation, he drank and took pills immoderately. He was a man of great shyness, but with friends he showed great openness, which often worked to his disadvantage. He was extremely vulnerable to demands - from directors, actresses, the public, his critics, admirers and detractors. He feigned disinterest in reviews, but he was deeply disturbed by them. Unfavorable ones could devastate him. Favorable ones might corrupt him.

The most successful serious playwright of his time, he did not write for success but, as one friend said, as a ''biological necessity.'' Frightened by Success Success struck him suddenly in 1945, with the Broadway premiere of ''The Glass Menagerie,'' and it frightened him much more than his failure. He was born as Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Miss., on March 26, 1911. His mother, the former Edwina Dakin, was the puritanical daughter of an Episcopal rector. His father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, was a violent and aggressive traveling salesman who later settled down in St. Louis as manager of a show company. There was an older daughter, Rose (memorialized as Laura in ''the Glass Menagerie''), and in 1919 another son was born, Walter Dakin. ''It was just a wrong marriage,'' the playwright wrote. The familial conflict is made clear by instances from the son's art.

His mother was the model for the foolish but indomitable Amanda Wingfield in ''The Glass Menagerie,'' his father for the blustering, brutish Big Daddy in ''Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.'' Acted Out Fantasies While his father traveled, Tom was mostly brought up, and overprotected, by his mother - particularly after he contracted diphtheria at the age of 5. By the time the family moved to St. Louis, the pattern was clear. Young Tom retreated into himself. He made up and told stories, many of them scary. In the fall of 1929 he went off to the University of Missouri to study journalism. When his childhood girlfriend, Hazel Kramer, also decided to enroll at Missouri, his father said he would withdraw him, and succeeded in breaking up the incipient romance. It was his only known romantic relationship with a woman. In a state of depression, Tom dropped out of school and, at his father's instigation, took a job as a clerk in a shoe company. It was, he recalled, ''living death.'' To survive, every day after work he retreated to his room and wrote - stories, poems, plays - through the night.

The strain finally led to a nervous breakdown. Sent to Memphis to recuperate, the young Mr. Williams joined a local theater group. Back in St. Louis, he became friendly with a group of poets at Washington University, particularly Clark Mills McBurney who, among other things, introduced Mr. Williams to the poems of Hart Crane. Crane became his idol. In 1937, Mr. Williams re-enrolled as a student, this time at the University of Iowa. There and in St. Louis he wrote an enormous, and uncounted, number of plays, some of which were produced on campus. In 1938, nine years after he had entered college, he graduated. Success seemed paired with tragedy. His sister lost her mind. The family allowed - with subsequent recriminations - a prefrontal lobotomy to be performed, and she spent much of her life in a sanitarium. Life in New Orleans At 28, Thomas Williams left home for New Orleans, where he changed his style of living, as well as his name. He offered several reasons for the name change. It was a reaction against his early inferior work, published under his real name. It was a college nickname.

It was because his father was from Tennessee. It was distinctive. In New Orleans he discovered new netherworlds, soaking up the milieu that would appear in ''A Streetcar Named Desire.'' He wrote stories, some of which later became plays, and entered a Group Theater playwriting contest. He won $100 and was solicited by the agent Audrey Wood, who became his friend and adviser. ''Battle of Angels,'' a play he wrote during a visit of several months to St. Louis, opened in Boston in 1940 and was a disaster. It closed in two weeks and did not come to New York. Mr. Williams, however, brought it back in a revised version in 1957 as ''Orpheus Descending'' and as the Marlon Brando-Anna Magnani movie, ''The Fugitive Kind,'' and in 1973 it was presented at the Circle Repertory Company. To his amazement, Audrey Wood got him a job in Hollywood writing scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer at $250 a week for six months.

He wrote a Lana Turner picture, worked briefly on a Margaret O'Brien picture and, disdainfully, began writing an original screenplay, which was rejected. Still under contract, in a house at Malibu, he began turning the screenplay into a play titled ''The Gentleman Caller,'' which slowly evolved into ''The Glass Menagerie.'' On March 31, 1945, five days after its author became 34, it opened on Broadway and changed Mr. Williams's life, and the American theater.. He was inundated with success -the play won the New York Drama Critics' Circle award - and he fought to keep afloat. ''Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle,'' he wrote, ''you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.'' His art was his salvation. Apprehending, he wrote his second masterpiece, ''A Streetcar Named Desire.'' Opening in December, 1947, ''Streetcar'' was an even bigger hit than ''The Glass Menagerie.'' It won Mr. Williams his second Drama Critics' award and his first Pulitzer Prize.

Never Stopped Revising For many years after ''Streetcar,'' almost every other season there was another Williams play on Broadway (and a one-act play somewhere else). Soon there was a continual flow from the stage to the screen. And he never stopped revising his finished work. For more than 35 years, the stream was unabated. He produced an enormous body of work, including more than two dozen full-length plays, all of them produced - a record unequaled by any of his contemporaries. There were successes and failures, and often great disagreement over which was which. In 1948 there was ''Summer and Smoke,'' which he wrote on Nantucket while sharing his house with his friend Carson McCullers (at his encouragement she was dramatizing ''The Member of the Wedding''). It failed on Broadway, was a huge success in a revival Off Broadway and made a star of Geraldine Page, one of many magnificent leading ladies in Mr. Williams's works (Laurette Taylor, Jessica Tandy, Vivien Leigh, Maureen Stapleton, Anna Magnani).

There followed ''The Rose Tattoo,'' ''Camino Real'' (a flop in 1953, but revived as a classic at Lincoln Center in 1970), ''Cat on a Hot Tin Roof'' (his third Drama Critics' prize, his second Pulitzer), ''Orpheus Descending,'' ''Garden District,'' ''Sweet Bird of Youth.'' Most of these plays have been seen again in major revivals. In addition to the plays, he wrote two novels, ''The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone'' and ''Moise and the World of Reason''; short stories, such as ''One Arm'' and ''Hard Candy''; a book of poetry, ''In the Winter of Cities,'' the film ''Baby Doll'' and his ''Memoirs.'' In his ''Memoirs,'' for the first time he wrote in detail about his homosexuality but, as usual, he was restrained in dealing with his creative life, explaining that his art was ''private.'' As he became more and more successful, Mr. Williams lost his look of boyish innocence and became somewhat portly and seedy. Gradually he found it more and more difficult to write.

The turning point, as he saw it, was 1955, and after ''Cat on a Hot Tin Roof'' there was a noticeable decline in his work. To keep going, he began relying on a ritualistic combination of ingredients -strong coffee, cigarettes, drugs and alcohol. In the late 1950's, Mr. Williams undertook psychoanalysis, explaining, ''If I am no longer disturbed myself, I will deal less with violent material.'' His first postanalysis work was the 1960 ''Period of Adjustment,'' a comedy that by common critical agreement was one of the slightest of his works. He went back to his nightmares and reached further out for subject matter. In terms of subject and theme, he was a pioneer, working with dark, theater of the absurd or the theater of cruelty was fashionable. ''The Night of the Iguana,'' which won a fourth Drama Critics' award for Mr. Williams in 1961, was considered a return to his earlier important work. As it turned out, it was his last major success. Converted to Catholicism After ''Iguana,'' Mr. Williams went searching and seemed to fall apart. But at the same time he discovered religion.

In 1968 he was converted to Roman Catholicism. And his last plays, though still dealing with grotesques, also dealt with salvation. ''The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore,'' which failed in successive years on Broadway and as an Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton movie entitled ''Boom!'', was an allegory about a Christlike young man and a dying dowager. His next three plays, ''Slapstick Tragedy,'' ''The Seven Descents of Myrtle'' and ''In a Bar in a Tokyo Hotel,'' also had minuscule runs. Recovering from an illness, he plunged back to work, writing and rewriting. In the 70's he was, characteristically, prolific, but success continued to elude him. ''Small Craft Warning'' had a comfortable run Off Broadway in 1972, and at one point, the author himself made his professional debut as an actor in his own play, assuming a small role. ''Out Cry'' was a quick failure on Broadway in 1973 and ''The Red Devil Battery Sign'' closed in Boston, although it was subsquently presented in London.

''Vieux Carre'' had a brief Broadway run in 1979 (and will be revived next month at the WPA). Of his later plays, his most popular was the poignant ''A Lovely Sunday at Creve Coeur'' in 1979. His last Broadway play was ''Clothes for a Summer Hotel,'' a drama about Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald that proved to be one of his biggest failures. Though wounded by the critical reception, he continued writing, in his last years working with noncommercial institutional theaters. ''Something Cloudy, Something Clear'' was produced Off Off Broadway at the Jean Cocteau Theater in 1981, and last year his final play, ''A House Not Meant to Stand,'' had its premiere at the Goodman Theater of Chicago. That play, subsequently presented at the New World Festival of the Arts in Miami, deals with the physical and emotional disintegration of an older married couple in Mississippi. In recent years, Mr. Williams divided his time between his apartment in New York at the Elysee and his house in Key West. He also kept an apartment in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the scene of ''A Streetcar Named Desire.'' Several weeks ago Mr.

Williams had come to New York from Key West. According to a close friend, ''He complained constantly of being exhausted and overworked and he said he was suffering with a shoulder condition.'' Mr. Williams's secretary, John Uecker, who shared the playwright's two-room hotel suite, said that at about 11 P.M. Thursday he heard a noise from Mr. Williams's room, but did not investigate. Yesterday morning at approximately 10:45 he entered the room and found him lying next to his bed. Mr. Williams is survived by his brother, Dakin, a Collinsville, Ill. attorney, and by his sister, Rose, who is in a nursing home in Westchester County. ''I always felt like Tennessee and I were compatriots,'' said Marlon Brando. ''He told the truth as best he perceived it, and never turned away from things that beset or frightened him. We are all diminished by his death.''

Question: Which playwright wrote A Streetcar Named Desire and Night of the Iguana?
Answer: Tennessee Williams